The AMD Radeon R7 265 & R7 260 Review: Feat Sapphire & Asus

Total War: Rome 2

The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Rome 2 is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a forested area with a large number of units, definitely stressing the GPU in particular.
For this game in particular we’ve also gone and turned down the shadows to medium. Rome’s shadows are extremely CPU intensive (as opposed to GPU intensive), so this keeps us from CPU bottlenecking nearly as easily.

Total War: Rome 2 is a solid showing for AMD’s new cards, but it’s not a blow-out in either direction. Here we find the R7 260 generally tied with the GTX 650 Ti, while the R7 265 trails the GTX 660 by around 5% at Very High quality settings. Meanwhile the R7 265 also just cracks 30fps at Extreme quality settings, though it’s close enough that I suspect most players will want to err on the side of caution and turn down the quality settings for a framerate that will have a much easier time staying above 30fps.